Let’s look beyond taking sides for or against mini-skirts

It has been a relief that the media had something other than presidential candidates’ crusades to focus on this past week.

The week, which started with Mr Miguna Miguna’s taunts to his opponents in lurid terms, progressed through a strike at a Murang’a school where girls demanded shorter skirts.

Things were spiced up by Education Minister Mutula Kilonzo agreeing with girls who reject apparel that confuses them with nuns.

By end of week, airwaves and social media were overwhelmed by debate on how much detail must be covered by female apparel at our schools.

While some bloggers were condemning this departure from what they call important issues like reform and leadership challenges, I think, indeed, it is about time that we called time on political clichés and opened up dialogue on issues that have been acutely overlooked.

Beyond taking sides for or against short skirts, the debate at hand has a few key facts coming through.

Kenyans live in very many different worlds. There are those whose sense of probity totally blinds them to what actually their daughters think they should do. We have many who think that wishing away the reality of their children’s daily lives changes the facts they live through. There are many who pay little attention to the goings-on around their children.

On the other end of the scale are those who are so brazen in treating their daughters like commodities for easy gain that they exceed our collective sense of tolerable behaviour.

We come from a past where girls were mostly viewed as objects of controlled sexuality. Most cultures defined the roles of maturing girls strictly in terms of being prepared to be married off without blemish.

In some cultures this is still so important that a threat of losing control can lead to early marriage, withdrawal from school or constant surveillance by male relatives.

The collective rebellion by the girls in Murang’a must be seen partly as a consequence of peer influence. Many private schools have long allowed short skirts as agreeable dressing. Many girls in our towns wear mini-skirts out of school.

Parents who abhor this reality are welcome to visit night spots frequented by their daughters during school holidays. Similarly, social media exposes youths to consumer trends regardless of their parentage and life situations. If we did an opinion poll, we would be shocked by how many other girls share the views of the Murang’a girls.

As we impose adult concerns and assumptions to our daily dialogue, we often fail to gain vibes that inform social dialogue among the youth in high school and beyond.

The parties organised through social media are having much greater impact on fashion and behaviour than many older people would care to know. To many younger people, the legitimacy of mini-skirts came a long time ago.

The very same week when parents are condemning short skirt advocates for exposing their daughters to immorality, the press carried the story of the Mombasa woman who received payment from a French pensioner in exchange for sex with her 12-year-old daughter. Stories of parents who take their under-age daughters out of school to be married off to old men for material gain remain commonplace.

As we gasp in shock, we must confront the reality that assumptions that all parents see themselves as custodians of their children’s morality is constantly assailed by perversions in the consumer economy that we are growing.

Kenya is a country in fundamental transformation. The knowledge, numbers and resourcefulness of the younger generations are a more fundamental force in changing perceptions and appetites than the obscurantism of the older generations. As school increasingly replaces parents in being the primary socialising institution, the split between what parents think and what their progeny internalise as the values of new Kenya was always coming.

Of course the momentum of change will remain varied. More rural schools will be held back relatively longer than the urban ones. Conservative values will be imposed more in neighbourhoods where parents continue to monitor their children at every turn.

But the reality of the working family and transformations in the social network of oversight and prefecting will continue to create a new Kenya where parental obsession with the sexuality of their children will increasingly recede in its impact on lifestyle and comportment among their sons and daughters.

The responses to minister Mutula Kilonzo are loud for obvious reasons. Old Kenya assumes that the minister for Education is the custodian of values they ascribe to their children. He is supposed to enforce the biases of ancient upbringing and its attendant hypocrisy.

They cannot understand that one in such a position should deviate from convention and volunteer an opinion so popular with the youth and discomforting to the old. Like Miguna Miguna, he is walking out of the ascribed comfort zone to challenge expected statement and group loyalty.

Dr Kituyi is a director of the Kenya Institute of Governance [email protected]